Social safety nets. The economic crisis has had an unprecedented impact on social welfare. The most pressing priority for the government is to provide immediate support to the most vulnerable to help alleviate the impact of the renewed downturn. Already, a package of measures on food, housing and access to health care has been adopted and is being implemented. In order to get people back to work, the authorities, working closely with European partners, have taken measures to boost employment by providing short-term work opportunities to 50.000 people targeting the long-term unemployed. The Government will adopt by March 2016 a further series of guaranteed employment support schemes covering 150,000 persons, including the long term unemployed (29+), young people (16-29), and disadvantaged groups (including inter alia GMI beneficiaries) with individualised active labour market measures for participants, using local partnerships, involving the private and social economy sectors and ensuring efficient and effective use of the resources available. A fairer society will require that Greece improves the design of its welfare system, so that there is a genuine social safety net which targets scarce resources at those in most need. The authorities plan to benefit from available technical assistance for the social welfare review and for the GMI implementation from international organisations.
Social safety nets. The Authorities have agreed with the European Institutions upon a new design for the reform of the Disabilities benefit framework (a mid-2019 specific commitment). The evaluation of an earlier pilot project gave rise to concerns about weaknesses in the questionnaire methodology adopted for the pilot. Following a discussion on EU best practices, a new reform approach will be adopted based on assessments of functional disability based upon physical examinations by qualified experts. Such assessments are widely used by other Member states with the dual role of assessing benefit eligibility and making specific proposals for disability mitigation and rehabilitation. The Authorities have provided a Roadmap for the implementation of the new design of the commitment. After an internal review to report by October 2020, they propose to undertake a further pilot project for the functional assessment that could focus on specific cases, like injury disability applicants from early 2021. As part of the commitment to complete the rollout of all three pillars of the Social Solidarity Income scheme, the authorities have completed the evaluation the of the pilot of the new delivery system for active labour market policies, an end-2019 commitment, and have set up initial plans to run further pilots for the expansion of the new model. The pilot covering three municipalities in the region of West Attica (Elefsina, Asporpyrgos, Mandra), has been evaluated by the World Bank with the help of technical support provided through the European Commission, in terms of service delivery and program design. The pilot was designed to provide integrated services as well as targeted and individualised support (profiling/counselling, vocational training, entrepreneurship, public works and wage subsidies) to those aged 45 and over who have been registered as unemployed for at least six months. Despite some significant drawbacks identified in the evaluation report, including among others the low human resources capacity, especially among employment counsellors; the lower than expected target group participation; the red-tape and implementation delays as well as the lack of primary data to be used for monitoring and evaluation purposes; the pilot is considered to represent the pathway for future reforms based on the open-framework model. The authorities will now proceed to the scale-up of the pilot in additional geographical areas with different labour market characteristics. The characteristics...
Social safety nets. The Targeted Public Distribution System is a social safety net program under the purview of the Department of Consumer and Civil Supplies that provides subsidized food commodities (i.e. rice, pulses and sugar) and kerosene to households through a network of independently run Fair Price Shops located throughout the state. The TPDS provides food grains to households at two sets of prices, depending on whether they are above or below the poverty line. APL households pay close to market price for food items whereas BPL households pay highly subsidized prices for 25kg of rice and 10kg of wheat per month. According to official TPDS statistics, 12,200,000 households possessed a BPL ration card In August 2010. With an estimated population of 83 million and an average family size of 5.6 (IIPS, 2008a), this would mean that 82 percent of all households have access to subsidized food grains through the PDS. However, it is highly unlikely that even a majority of households with BPL cards are able to collect their full entitlement from Fair Price Shops for reasons that will be discussed later.
